On Friday, Musk revealed 198,000 people had already put down $1,000 deposits for the Model 3, which isn’t slated to be released until late next year, at the earliest.

Yesterday, the CEO tweeted Model 3 orders have hit 276,000 in just three days. In response to a customer, Musk confirmed “if the trend continues”, pre-orders will surpass 500,000, even before the company’s Part 2 reveal of the vehicle, which is still to-be-announced.

Part of exploring technologies and picking the right one is becoming so familiar with it you can see ways that it can be used. And for us, we’ve never been about being first. We’ve been about being best. So we explore many different things, many different technologies. And at first we might not know what product it might wind up in. And then later we’ll see that that really cool technology enables maybe things that we’re doing today to take on something bigger, maybe something new. But once we start spending gobs of money—like when we start spending on tooling and things like that—we’re committed.